The War After Armageddon

The northern sky threatened rain. The Germans had torn the roofs from the dockside warehouses out of spite, and the vast herd of refugees waiting to board a ship to safety had no protection against a downpour beyond what they wore on their backs. The tentage the U.S. Army had brought to Bremerhaven barely met the requirement for sick wards. Half of the kids in the dockyards had diarrhea, the shitters were too few for one-tenth the number of refugees who staggered from the trains, and Doc Brodsky worried about cholera. The doc wanted the Navy to give priority to bringing in saline solution. But his claim for aircraft space was just one among many. There weren’t enough rations aboard the advance vessels to feed the refugees. A shortage of potable water meant that the throng on the wharves was dehydrating. They already smelled of death.

Harris heard gunfire. Inland. Less than a kilometer, he judged. Inside the fence. Near the railhead.

His greatest worry had been a shoot-out with the German border police, who were behaving a little too much like the worst of their ancestors. Given all that had occurred, he understood the Germans’ anger. He just couldn’t fathom their cruelty. In his more cynical moments, he wondered if it was in their DNA.

The simultaneous detonation of dirty bombs in Berlin, Hamburg, and Frankfurt, as well as in Paris, Brussels, Amsterdam, Barcelona, Milan, Rome, London, and Manchester, had been the signal for the Great Jihad. Muslim radicals told their kind that Europe had lost its will, that it needed only a push to topple and leave a new caliphate standing.

It had been all madness. The Islamists hadn’t had the numbers. The majority of their fellow Muslims in Europe wanted no part of the violence. But enough rose up to seal the fate of the rest. The Muslim rioting had been severe, with atrocities committed in the streets against any ethnic European on whom the radicals laid hands.

In less than a week, the equation shifted decisively. The anti-Muslim pogroms that followed did not distinguish between those who had committed crimes and those who had only tried to wait out the chaos. In every country, the authorities either tolerated or abetted the revenge killings.

Within a month, the counterattacks on Europe’s Muslims spread so widely and grew so brutal that the United States led the world in demanding that Europe’s governments end it. But the governments answered to the people, and the people wanted blood. Mobs ruled, even in parliaments. It was as if the rebellion had broken a dam behind which decades of fury had been rising.

NATO dissolved amid the threats aimed at ending the butchery. Infected by the continental hysteria, the European Union — whose Islamic delegates had gone into hiding — voted overwhelmingly to expel Muslims from the continent. The United States demanded a monitoring role to ensure that the refugees were treated humanely. Of course, that was more than a year before the nuclear destruction of Israel and the terror attacks on Los Angeles and Las Vegas.

The Great Evacuation had come first. Bringing the U.S. military back to Europe for the last, brief time. From Bremerhaven to Brindisi.

With his first star on his uniform and the clouds brooding overhead, Harris turned to his forward staff and snapped, “Find out who’s shooting. Now. And get the Rapid Reaction Force out where everybody can see it.” Wind slapped canvas down along the wharf.

“Already moving, sir.”

“Hold them at the warehouse line. I just want them visible. I’ll call if I need them.”

“Sir? It’s Cavanaugh. He’s at the railhead.”

Harris drew on his headset. “This is Trailmaster Six. What’ve you got?”

The voice that answered sought to be steady and failed. “Rodeo Six Alpha. No ketchup. We had to shoot in the air to get their attention. But you’ve got to see this. The bastards.”

“Get yourself under control, Six Alpha. Now. I’ll be there in one-zero mikes. And I don’t want to hear any more shots unless you mean it.” Harris looked around at the what-the-hell? faces. “Let’s go.”

“Want the RRF to make a hole, sir?” That was the Three.

Harris looked out over the mass of refugees and shook his head. “They’ve already had enough of men with guns.” But he reset the holster on his thigh, a reflex action. There were radicals seeded among the refugees, those who hadn’t quite been up to suicide attacks but who were dangerous enough — and bitter that the United States, the Great Satan, had come to the aid of Muslims, queering their schemes. In Marseilles, a Marine colonel had been stabbed as he reached to lift a child, and there had been a riot on the wharves at Rotterdam, with a Navy SP beaten to death. Here, on the Bremerhaven docks, where the U.S. armed forces long had shipped out the autos of its members returning from Germany, Harris’s biggest problem had been preventing the radicals from further terrorizing their fellow Muslims.